I guess I'm not sure how you view non-Theists as "materialists". Are you saying you view people who do not believe in the supernatural, likewise do not appreciate, or even possess intangible attributes? It would be nearly impossible for a conscious human being to not experience things such as imagination, emotion, curiosity; these are "nonmaterial" things inherent to the human condition. Maybe it's just a confusing choice of the word "materialists"? Maybe it's also confusing that a generalization be assigned to a group, by a person who doesn't consider himself to be part of said group. Mmm... a smidgen of condescending judgement, perhaps?

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:... historically smart people have believed in God.

This is true, but if one said "historically, ignorant people believed in God"; the statement would be just as accurate. So... is there a point?

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:What seems to matter more is why a person believes or does not believe.

Yes I agree, for many, "why" is a bone of contention, but likewise for many, belief is simply a moot point. Many have never had a belief in the supernatural and are completely indifferent to it.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:But either side (of the smart people) have the duty to define that which they say they don't believe in or that they do believe in.

Many do not feel obligated to declare a statement or definition of something that is not important to them. It's ok when people do as long as they use words like I, me, or my... and not you, we, and everyone. One can only really define, declare, or speak for oneself.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:I believe God is the monistic entity of fundamental consciousness.

This statement is ok with me if you put the word "my" in between "of" and "fundamental". The way you've worded it, you are deciding for others what it is they should or should not believe.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:If I try to define him more specifically, I lose sight of Him. If I try to personify Him, I realize immediately that I am doing so only to bring a bit of Him into my mind. If I create theories about Him, I realize that even if it seems like logical speculation, I am only speculating.

Interesting. You lay out your thoughts quite well, here. It's good to speak for yourself - it is all one can do.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:More importantly, I don't think that kind of God really cares whether or not we believe He exists. Those who don't are merely parts of him that do not have that attribute of abstract self-knowledge. None of the animals on earth appear to have any concept of God. Most people on earth have strange religious anthropomorphic ideas of God that aren't based in any kind of higher reality (Most religions are just a way of controlling people and have nothing whatsoever to do with God.). Still more people are atheists, and only a few have a glimpse of God as He is, and that glimpse is very limited.

Ha- yes - I think many would agree with your thoughts on the control of religion -and even support these thoughts with extensive historical evidence.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:Here's the rub: When we die, I believe our consciousness enters a lucid spiritual plane. There we are aware that we are creating the scenery with our minds, and we can control many aspects of our environment that we cannot control now. But if I am right, God will probably be less apparent then than He is now, because we will be wearing many of the hats that he wears for us now. In other words, the more we become like God, the less God will be apparent to us. One day, we will be unified with the Divine, and we won't have any sense of God at all--after all, God doesn't have a God.

Go Egor! You've sincerely done a lot of thinking. It's tough going... and it might get even more grueling as newer and freer ideas form. Putting them down into a coherent pattern, free of misunderstanding is always difficult. Choosing accurate words to enhance one's thoughts is definitely a bitch! Shit, you have no idea how long it's taken me just to decide how to write this one fucking sentence!

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote:

Quote:I have gone on a bit here, but I'm bored and depressed today. So sue me.

Hmm, the bored and depressed feeling could be the result of honestly presenting your thoughts -you've done quite a lot of thinking and it can be draining. Unless there's something else that's got you down. You can always come here and unload - we all do it at times. You will have to be prepared to be either attacked or ignored at best, if any whining goes on about God stuff; many of us just don't care about it, while some are down right resentful about it. Religion has hurt many people.

However, if you lay out your ideas, clearly expressing yourself as you have here, you might get some good, useful, positive feedback. If you seriously need to exchange some God talk, there's a couple of other Theists around ... Kingschosen of course, and I think Tarzan69 is still around. Oh, I might listen to God talk, maybe intently or I may just nod my head for no reason and walk away. Sorry; I'm one of the indifferent ones. Much of what comes out of me may or may not be true... but don't tell anyone.

So what you're saying is, when we die, we become God? or a part of God.

If God is the monistic entity of fundamental consciousness, then all that exists is God. In fact, there can be no other God than a monistic entity, and the only possible substance of that entity would have to be a form of consciousness.

Ironically, this theory would predict that the more fundamental we get in examining matter, the more consciousness plays a part in the attributes of matter. Perhaps if we can ever breakdown a quark into more fundamental particles we will discover what results only results if it is observed and would have the constituency of a mirage.

But you asked about after death. I honestly believe that consciousness does not die with the body, and I have reasons for that, but I will discuss those reasons some other time. If that is true, then the only thing we can imagine occuring is a type of dream state. And if we know we are dead, that dream state would automatically become like a lucid dream. Unlike a lucid dream, however, where we typically will awake soon after becoming lucid, we would not be able to wake, we would stay in the lucid dream. Very quickly we would become like gods.

If that is the case, the lessons we learn in this life, no matter how hard they are, no matter how tragic, would become the wisdom we use to rule that particular universe. We would be the fundamental consciousness from wich all things would have their ultimate substance.

People think this would be a better state of being, and it might be, or it might not be. The things we think matter now, money, health, personal satisfaction, accomplishment, wouldn't mean a lot in that situation. What would matter is the ability to apply faith, since that is how things work in a lucid dream (if you believe you can fly in a lucid dream, you can. If you don't, then you believe you will fall, and you do.). Love, real love, that means the unconditional concern for others over yourself would be more important than what you could get for yourself, because there would be no needs on your part, and you would probably want to create other beings (or resurrect them from your memory), and those beings would be more dependent on you than any animal or child ever could be. You would actually be the source of their existence.

I'm speculating now, of course, but I think in a reasonable way.

There is a danger, however in thinking this way. The more you do, the more desperate you might be to get there, like a baby brought to term becomes desperate for its birth.

Maybe God is merciful in that if you would only turn such a state of being into a living hell, he reincarnates you into another life to live again and learn. Maybe he wouldn't be merciful, and an eternal hell is the result. But I think I'm starting to lean toward the former, because if you go to hell, God goes with you--if he is the monistic entity of fundamental consciousness.

There, now I've told you all my thoughts on God.

(06-05-2012 03:13 AM)kim Wrote: Oh, I might listen to God talk, maybe intently or I may just nod my head for no reason and walk away. Sorry; I'm one of the indifferent ones. Much of what comes out of me may or may not be true... but don't tell anyone.

You're not indifferent. If you were, you wouldn't be in this forum, and you certainly wouldn't stay up late responding to me. But here is something that is beginning to dawn on me: If you are right and there is no God and there is no hell, and if I keep going the way I am and realize that God doesn't really care if you believe in Him or not, that it's not required to achieve his purpose and we are all modalities of the monistic entity of fundamental consciousness, your atheism doesn't matter. You being an atheist doesn't matter. If you were to turn and believe, it wouldn't matter. If you go on to your lucid spiritual plane--and beyond it--God will only disappear proportionally meaning this: that it doesn't matter your stance against God. Just do what you were born to do. That's it.

Maybe you'll reincarnate over and over and it will be like in the song "H." by Tool:

And as the walls come down and
As I look in your eyes
My fear begins to fade
Recalling all of the times
I have died
and will die.
It's all right.
I don't mind.

(05-05-2012 11:55 PM)Egor Wrote: Here's the rub: When we die, I believe our consciousness enters a lucid spiritual plane. There we are aware that we are creating the scenery with our minds, and we can control many aspects of our environment that we cannot control now.

Ok, so why do you believe this and how would you know, or rather, how did you come up with this?

I believe "we" are actually "God."And that is not a new idea. Nearly 2000 years ago, some of the early Christian gnostics believed this. In the second and third centuries, they were just as popular as what became orthodox. Here is what Valentinus (Rome, c 150 CE) believed.

Valentinus’ ideas on how things are might be summarized thus: people from all walks of life recognized that there was something wrong with their lives. We lived in a “system” that was
defective. So-called orthodox Christians, as well as Jews, recognised that there was a “wrongness” in human existence, but they accounted for it chiefly in terms of the effects of human sin, original or otherwise. They believed that whatever was wrong with the world and human existence was the result of human disobedience to the creator. This meant that all evil, discomfort, and terror in their lives and in history were somehow man’s fault. So a theme of “Mea Culpa” ran through this worldview, which permanently affixed to the human psyche an element of guilt. Valentinus, in opposition to this, shifted the blame for the wrongness in the world from humanity to divinity. That God the creator could be at fault in anything was tantamount to blasphemy in the eyes of the orthodox. Yet Valentinus did not view the creator with the worshipful eyes of the Judeo-Christian believer, but rather saw the creator, along with other divinities, as mythical creations of man. Consider this quote from the Gospel of Philip (part of the Nag Hammadi library):

“God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. It would be fitting for the gods to worship men” (Logion 85: 1–4).

He believed humans had the potential to resolve the wrongness of their existence by using “Gnosis,” or self-knowledge. He thought that because human minds had lost their self-knowledge, we lived in a world that was lacking in integrity. Knowledge of self was the real resurrection - resurrection from the death of ignorance.

Valentinus would say there was no need whatsoever for guilt, or for repentance from so-called sin. Nor was there a need for belief in a salvation by way of the death of Jesus. We didn't need to
be saved; we need to be transformed, by Gnosis, the activation of self-knowledge.

The proposition that the human mind lives in a largely self-created world, from whence only Gnosis can rescue it, is common to Buddhism. According to Buddha, the world of apparent reality consists
of ignorance and the lack of authentic selfhood.

He didn’t negate or diminish the importance of Jesus in his teachings, and claimed they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself. For the Valentinians, Christ was like a brother. The great devotion and reverence shown for Jesus is manifest in the Gospel of Truth from Nag Hammadi, which in its original form was authored by Valentinus himself. Jesus is indeed a saviour, but the term needs to be understood in the meaning of the original Greek word “soter,” meaning healer, or bestower of health. “Soteria” meant healthiness, deliverance from imperfection, and becoming whole.

The Gnostic believed that all wrongness in the world has one common root: ignorance. We are often ignorant of the authentic values of life and substitute inauthentic ones for them. The
inauthentic values are either physical or of the mind. We often believe that we need things (such as money, symbols of power, prestige or physical pleasures) in order to be happy or whole. Similarly, we fall in love with the ideas and abstractions of our minds; the rigidities and the hardness of our lives can then be due to our excessive attachment to abstract concepts and precepts. The Gnostics called the sickness of materialism “hyleticism” (worship of matter), while the sickness of abstract intellectualism and moralizing was known as “psychism” (worship of the mind/emotional soul).

What then was the role of Jesus, the soter, the healer-savior, the spiritual maker of wholeness, if he clearly had no need to save us from sin? He could exorcise the sicknesses of hyleticism and psychism by bringing knowledge of the pneuma (spirit) to the soul and mind. What is this pneuma, this spirit, which alone brings Gnosis and healing? They could not truly say what it was, but could indicate what it did. It brought a flexibility and courage to life. By way of the healing agency of pneuma, the soul ceased to be fascinated and confined by things and ideas and could address itself to life. The obsessive state of material and mental attachments was thus replaced by spiritual freedom; the inauthentic values of the former were made to give way to the authentic ones brought by the spirit.

(06-05-2012 03:33 AM)Egor Wrote: then all that exists is God..Ironically, this theory would predict that the more fundamental we get in examining matter, the more consciousness plays a part in the attributes of matter. Perhaps if we can ever breakdown a quark into more fundamental particles we will discover what results only results if it is observed and would have the constituency of a mirage. ....... much of what comes out of me may or may not be true... but don't tell anyone.
If you are right and there is no God and there is no hell, and if I keep going the way I am and realize that God doesn't really care if you believe in Him or not....you being an atheist doesn't matter. If you were to turn and believe, it wouldn't matter. If you go on to your lucid spiritual plane--and beyond it--God will only disappear proportionally meaning this: that it doesn't matter your stance against God. Just do what you were born to do. That's it.

On no. It does matter a GREAT deal. "Doesn't matter" is Nihilism, (depression at loss of world view ??) Obviously never examinined. So it's back to the "not exist if not observed" crap, with the addition now of "consciousness 'plays a part' in matter" too. Bat shit. Trouble is, there's this rock over there. And when I come back, it's still there. And it's not conscious. The end. The further deconstruction, yet just one step further of matter into sub-quarks is totally irrelevant. No shred of observational evidence. Total conjecture. The moon is made of green cheese. So "perhaps not". "Consciousness" has NEVER once been defined by said poster. So said's "theory" could actually "predict" anything under the sun, and then be said to be consistent with ramblings/"theory". Actually said's "theory" is as old as the hills. It's known as Pantheism. Consciouness requires time. Said's god cannot be creator of dimensions required for own existence, (broken record). Said poster refuted own god, in other thread, and cannot explain how said's god is ANY different, or how it was NOT refuted by said's post, rufuting ALL gods. So much for said poster.

Insufferable know-it-all. It is objectively immoral to kill innocent babies. Please stick to the guilty babies.

All Atheist are innocent of:
The crime of believing in superstitious unfounded beliefs.
The crime of child abuse by scaring children with false beliefs of eternal punishment.
The crime of condemning homosexuals because they are homosexual.
The crime of ignoring scientific facts in favor of religious dogma.

The old gods are dead, let's invent some new ones before something really bad happens.